Railroad Picture of the day
I'd planned to leave work at around 5pm today so I could get down to the SP Yellow Menace mainline in time to see the northbound Coast Starlight pass through east Portland. I ended up staying a little later than I thought, and when the bus got over the river I decided that I could get down near the mainline faster if I got off at 9th and walked down towards Division. This turned out to be a good choice, because I was still about a block away from the tracks when I heard #118 blowing for the 11th+12th street crossing(s); I broke into a dead run and reached the crossing approximately 5 seconds before the train popped out from behind the Northwest Natural Gas yard and blew across the crossing.
(The slight rotation of the picture is an artifact of my consistant inability to hold a camera level. My traditional way to fix this would be to do fine tuning with Irfanview, but I've replaced my Windows laptop with a MacBook, and MacOS, even though it's a fine operating system, doesn't have any image viewing programs that play in the same league as Irfanview. So I'm stuck with (ugh) iPhoto, which is like doing image processing with crayons and a popsicle stick.)